Uprooted

by Naomi Novik

I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn’t care: I didn’t feel I owed him beauty.

“It comes, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, “of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.”

He looked at me, baffled and for the first time uncertain, as though he had stumbled into something, unprepared. His long narrow hands were cradled around mine, both of us holding the rose together. Magic was singing in me, through me; I felt the murmur of his power singing back that same song. I was abruptly too hot, and strangely conscious of myself. I pulled my hands free.

There was a song in this forest, too, but it was a savage song, whispering of madness and tearing and rage.

No one was enchanted beyond saving in the songs. The hero always saved them. There was no ugly moment in a dark cellar where the countess wept and cried out protest while three wizards put the count to death, and then made court politics out of it.

“You intolerable lunatic,” he snarled at me, and then he caught my face between his hands and kissed me.

His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales.

truth didn’t mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn’t come and listen.

All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.

But wanting cruelty felt like another wrong answer in an endless chain.